Imagined Neighbors

This publication examines the Japanese artistic understanding of China from the late 1600s, Japan’s period of seclusion, to its age of modernization after the mid-nineteenth century. The volume focuses on the ways Japanese painters from the late 1600s to the twentieth century pictured China, both as a real place and an imagined promised land. It features three essays by renowned Japanese art historians in addition to more than fifty catalogue entries highlighting unusual artworks revealing Japanese artists’ complex responses to Chinese art, history and culture.